One of These Things First

by Steven Gaines

  “You don’t know anything,” he said, going back to his puzzle. “You don’t even know how to hold your silverware. I saw you in the dining room tonight.” He took a long drag on his cigarette and exhaled dragon smoke at me.

  “I know how to hold silverware,” I protested feebly.

  “Do you know who my wife is?” he demanded. I shook my head. “My wife is Mary Martin. I hope you know who that is.”

  I was astonished. “Mary Martin who is Peter Pan?”

  “Mary Martin who is Peter Pan,” he mimicked me.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said. When I was nine years old I became possessed when my mother read in the newspaper that the Broadway production of Peter Pan, starring Mary Martin, was going to be telecast live from a studio in Brooklyn, just two miles from where we lived. I made my father drive slowly past the studio building every day for weeks, staring at the bricks as if I had x-ray vision. For days leading up to the broadcast I could neither think nor talk of anything but Peter Pan. I watched the show lying on the floor of the living room in front of our black-and-white console TV, swooning and slack-jawed as Mary Martin and the Darling children glided clumsily through the air on thick cables.

  “You don’t believe me, do ya?” Mr. Holiday took a slim leather wallet from his back pocket and slipped a photograph out of a sleeve. “Here’s a picture of Mother and me with Heller.” It was a matte black-and-white photo of him and a woman who might have been Mary Martin, I wasn’t sure, and a teenaged girl, standing in a farm field with mountains in the background. I was confused. He called Mary Martin “mother,” and yet she was his wife? Maybe show business people called each other “mother” and “father”? Then it began to dawn on me. Unless this man was totally crazy, he was married to Mary Martin who was Peter Pan, and he was a famous Broadway producer.

  I choked on my own saliva. I could have passed out from excitement. Perhaps he would discover me and put me in a Broadway show. I would be famous. I would be vindicated for being crazy. I could hold my head up. Even Arnie and Irv would have to show respect. I was so thrilled that when I tried to speak I gushed whatever came into my head. “I saw Peter Pan on TV three times,” I said. “It was the best thing I ever saw on television. I know all of the songs by heart. The television studio was near my house in Brooklyn. And last year my parents took me to a Saturday matinee of The Sound of Music. It was great!”

  “Well, that’s very nice,” he said stiffly, as if he was tired of hearing praise now that I was impressed. “You’re a faaan,” he drawled, grabbing a fresh handful of puzzle pieces. “That’s what you’ll say when I introduce you to Mother—‘I’m a fan, and I saw Peter Pan three times, and I saw you in the Sound of Music, and you were greaaaat.’”

  Introduce me to her. Had he said that?

  He fell silent now and frowned, lost in dark rumination. “A good exit is even more important than a good entrance,” he said to me. “An exit is the last impression a person has of you. More important I think than first impressions, because you can always change a first impression. But once you say goodbye, the court of appeals on you has closed. One of Mother’s most important exits on stage was at the end of the second act of South Pacific, when Nellie says goodbye to Emile. Just before she exited stage right Mother hesitated for a brief moment—half a gesture, very subtle, ever so touching—and when the curtain came down everybody had tears in their eyes. Then one day after the show Noël Coward, that vile man, came backstage and said to Mother, ‘How wonderful that exit was! The brief moment when you paused was superb.’ And you know what? Mother was never able to make that exit again. Every time the moment came at the end of the second act she thought of what that prick Noël Coward had said to her, and her timing was off. He made her self-conscious, that evil man.”

  I guess I looked bewildered. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you, Mr. Brooklyn?”

  “I do. I think I do,” I said, desperately not wanting to be Mr. Brooklyn, even though I had never heard of Noël Coward.

  “I think now it’s time for you to make your exit,” he said. “I’d like to be left alone with my puzzle.”

  “Sure,” I agreed, backing out the door like a geisha. “Will I see you tomorrow, Mr. Holiday?”

  “We’re locked up together,” he said, dry as toast. “We have no fucking choice but to see each other tomorrow. And stop calling me ‘Holiday.’ My name is Halliday.”

  Halliday. Halliday. I floated down the hall on a cloud of stardust. Halliday. I must have looked like Butterfly McQueen in Gone with the Wind, lollygagging down the street waving her apron. Outside the nurse’s office I ran into the woman who had been sitting at the table with the “Barbara Ann” man. Her name was Hilda, it would turn out. She was a Seven Sisters spinster recovering from a wee nervous collapse, a prickly soul who smelled of lavender. She had gray ringlets across her forehead like a flapper, and she was wearing a flannel bathrobe and men’s pajamas. She owned a small savings and loan in Vermont and shoplifted at Bergdorf Goodman. Hilda carried a purse with her everywhere she went—hence her nickname, “Miss Moneybags”—although according to rules she wasn’t allowed to have money in it. She had just taken her evening medications from a small paper cup while a nurse watched, so she didn’t hide them under her tongue. “So you met Mr. Halliday?” she asked me with a mean smile. “Did he talk nonstop about Mary Martin?”

  As far as I was concerned he could talk about Mary Martin all day and night. “No,” I lied.

  “He will,” she assured me. “He is Mary Martin.”

  It turned out she was right, after a fashion.

  Richard Halliday was consumed with being the husband, manager, producer, collaborator, costume consultant, and alter ego of Mary Martin. A former drama critic for the New York World Telegram, he married Mary Martin when she was a Hollywood ingénue and he was the story editor at Paramount Pictures, in an era when the story editor had the power to choose which films would be made. But Mary Martin somehow never really made it in pictures, and they gave up Hollywood for Broadway, where for the last thirty years of his life Mr. Halliday worked to turn her into one of the great stars of the American musical theater.

  I became Richard Halliday’s handmaiden. Every minute of the day I found some excuse to be near him, to sit next to him in the dining room or stand nearby in the elevator as we were shuttled up to occupational therapy, where I sat across from him as we wove raffia baskets. In retrospect I think the Archduke of Neverland felt reduced by the adulation of a rube kid, and yet he couldn’t help but be flattered. Moreover, I was his only friend. Halliday didn’t like the other patients, and they didn’t seem to like him. He was mysterious. He never talked about his problems and kept mostly to himself, either reading or doing his jigsaw puzzles.

  He was particularly at odds with Harold Kellogg, the “Barbara Ann” man from my first night in the dining room. The dapper Mr. Kellogg was a professor of architecture at Harvard, where he helped design the business school library, as well as libraries for Princeton and Cornell, and worked on over two hundred townhouses in Manhattan. He was also a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite and an insufferable snob who wore beautiful Scottish wool tweed sport jackets. Three months earlier he had written a letter to a colleague saying that he was going to hang himself in the library he had helped design. His family hustled him into Payne Whitney, where, instead of giving him shock treatment, lest the great architectural musings in his head be erased, the doctors put him on a new drug called Imipramine, the first of the tricyclic antidepressants. What they didn’t realize was that Imipramine would swing Kellogg into a full-blown manic episodes. He started out the beginning of the day in a three-piece suit and ended it in a four-point restraint in the Quiet Room. They kept him on the seventh floor for a month before they were able to stabilize him. Once he came around, he was insufferable.

  Kellogg didn’t think much of Mr. Halliday, or the musical theater. If the two o
f them had been less gentlemanly, there would have been fisticuffs. As it stood there was a silence between them that frosted the air when they were in the same room. One day at lunch Kellogg proudly announced that the last Broadway show he saw was Antigone in 1946. I could see how this made Mr. Halliday steam. Out of Halliday’s earshot, I heard Kellogg say that perhaps Mary Martin could teach Mr. Halliday how to fly. He also carped to the nurses that Mr. Halliday had appropriated the card table in the sunporch for his jigsaw puzzles while Kellogg and his bridge-playing cronies had to play on a rickety foldout table in the lounge.

  I was happy to be Mr. Halliday’s entourage of one, and we passed many winter afternoons together in the sunroom chatting while we assembled Van Gogh’s bedroom at the Yellow House. He told me how Ezio Pinza’s Italian accent was so bad during rehearsals for South Pacific that they had to teach him to say the words phonetically, and how Mother broke her elbow in two places and almost broke her back learning to fly during rehearsals of Peter Pan, and how horrible Noël Coward was to work with in London on Pacific 1860.

  In turn I told him about making meat sauce with Tina Mastriano and the big dick on the donkey. I told him about the tribulations of trying to fit a double-D breast into a double-C cup when you didn’t have the right size in stock. “You’d stuff in one side and the other side would plop out,” I explained in earnest. I told him how Katherine came to live with us. At first he just tolerated my dotty Brooklyn stories, but over time he started to listen. He enjoyed a good tale. I was no Scheherazade, but he was a captive audience, and my stories were authentic pieces of a place deliciously foreign to him, with no passage there by any other conveyance than me.

  “You should write all this down,” he told me one afternoon.

  It was just an offhand comment but I jumped on it hungrily. “Do you think I should? Really?” I prodded. “It’s funny that you mention it because I was thinking of writing it down.”

  “I think you should,” he nodded.

  That’s what I’ll do, I told myself. I’ll write them all down and publish them and then I’ll be famous. But the next day I admitted to Mr. Halliday that I didn’t know how to write them down. “Starting is the hardest part,” he lectured. He was so right; it was a lifetime before I actually got around to it.

  Splendor in the Grass

  Payne Whitney might have been the Ivy League, but it was still a mental hospital and our days were regimented. We were expected up at 7 a.m., in bed by 10 p.m. We changed our sheets and made our own beds. We were expected promptly at meals when the dining room chimes rang at 8 a.m., 12:30, and 6:30 p.m. If you were ten minutes late to a meal you were charted and given a sandwich in your room. The nurses took our temperature and blood pressure every three hours and checked on us through the night. Patients from different floors were segregated from each other and they were moved around in groups, herded into the large elevators to be taken up to occupational therapy in the mornings or after lunch down to the formal garden with an octagonal path on which we walked round and round, gossiping about the other patients and our doctors. The only thing that took precedence over our daily schedules were sessions with our psychiatrists, which were held in our Spartan rooms in chairs facing each other.

  At night, after dinner, we were brought to a gloomy institutional gymnasium that hadn’t been renovated since Mr. Payne Whitney gifted the money to build the hospital. Kafka couldn’t have created a more depressing landscape than the dimly lighted gym on the roof of the loony bin—although the views of the East Side of Manhattan and the 59th Street Bridge were exquisite. There wasn’t much exercise equipment in the gym except for a sagging, shoulder-high net that did double duty for badminton and volleyball. I discovered that I liked volleyball, although it wasn’t much of a challenge playing against Miss Moneybags. Still it was the first sport I kind of got.

  There was also an ancient wood rowing machine that I began to use every night, rowing myself to nowhere fast, and one of the male aides taught me how to do sit-ups by hooking my feet under the calisthenics bar attached to the wall. With the stingy servings of hospital food and going to the gym every night, I began to lose my baby fat. Once I noticed the change in the mirror, vanity stirred in me, and I stopped eating bread and dessert.

  There were only a few other adolescents, about whom I had no curiosity, only discomfort. I saw them in passing as we were transported up and down in the elevators. We stared at each other like caged animals recognizing their own species. They all looked crazy to me in their odd ways—a spooky squint, a strange tilt of head—and I didn’t want to be sick like them. I wasn’t, of course, because I was in some sort of a movie, and my craziness was only part of a series of plot twists, the latest of which was meeting Richard Halliday.

  The first couple of weeks in therapy I talked nonstop about Mary Martin to Dr. Myers. My newly acquired encyclopedic knowledge of her career, filled with anecdotes about costume changes, so exasperated him that he finally told me to stop talking about her altogether. He said I was using it as a defense instead of talking about things that really mattered, that I should let myself free-associate and my mind wander. He just didn’t understand. I couldn’t stop talking about Mary Martin. I was a Lost Boy and she was Peter Pan. But instead of talking about Mary Martin, the usual suspects began to flicker across the screen: Aunt Rifka, Fat Anna, Katherine, Tina, and Little Rich.

  Dr. Myers wrote it all down on his yellow pad like I was some oracle, but he reacted to nothing. Freudian analysis is Socratic, so if I asked him a personal question like, “Where are you from?” he would answer, “Where do you think I’m from?” And if I said I thought he was from New York, he’d ask, “What would it mean to you if I was from New York?” Cute. But I needed to know some basics about him to be able to communicate. Like, was he Jewish? Because Myers was a Jewish name. So when I asked if he was Jewish, he said, “What would it mean to you if I was Jewish?”

  I said, “You would understand me better, and Myers is a Jewish name.”

  “It depends on how it’s spelled,” he said. I guess he meant Meyers, with two e’s. So, he wasn’t even Jewish? How would he understand anything?

  “What are you thinking?” he asked me.

  “I’m thinking that you won’t understand anything because you’re a goy.”

  “How would you feel about that?”

  It was infuriating.

  Although it led to unexpected places.

  One day I told him about my Borough Park shtetl and what it was like to have the Culver Theater on the corner. I told him about Murray the manager, and believing that I won the Schwinn bike, and that I could watch movies all day if I wanted. I probably watched hundreds of movies over the years, maybe thousands. I told Dr. Myers that I loved science fiction and horror, and any kind of family melodrama. Paddy Chayefsky was my favorite screenwriter. His situations were always so powerful and poignant, like in Marty, the film about a lonely, middle-aged Italian butcher from the Bronx, played by Ernest Borgnine, who won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1955 for the title role. And of course I told Dr. Myers about my favorite movie of all time, Splendor in the Grass, that I watched eleven times in six days. It was written by another great storyteller, William Inge, who won the Academy Award for best screenplay, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for writing the play and movie Picnic, that starred—

  Dr. Myers roused from a long period of silence and asked, “What made you want to see Splendor in the Grass eleven times?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied, flustered. The truth was that there was a shower scene in Splendor in the Grass in which you got to see Warren Beatty with his shirt off, and behind him was another guy in a towel, as erotic as any porn movie to me.

  “I’ve seen that movie,” Dr. Myers said. “The girl in that movie has a nervous breakdown.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Deanie. Played by Natalie Wood.”

  “And she goes to a hospital?”

 
“Yes,” I said.

  “Like you?”

  “I … guess so.”

  “Do you remember why she had a nervous breakdown?”

  “Her mother—”

  He interrupted me, breaking protocol. “She had a nervous breakdown because she wanted to have sex with her boyfriend, but sex is forbidden because she’s a ‘good girl,’ and her mother wants her to be a virgin. And her bottled-up desire eventually drives her to a suicide attempt.”

  I felt my cheeks go on fire.

  Dr. Myers asked, “What are you thinking?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “You can’t be thinking nothing.”

  I said, “I was thinking that I saw Splendor in the Grass eleven times because it was a very good movie.”

  Dr. Myers gave me a disapproving look, another breach of protocol, so he must have been really annoyed. “I need you to do this with me,” he said. Then he announced the session was over, ten minutes early.

  His displeasure unnerved me more than I expected. I was afraid he would stop caring about me. That night I asked Mr. Halliday if he lied to his psychiatrist, and he said that everybody lied to their therapist a little, but that it was a waste to lie because it was the doctor’s job to make you better.

  But what could I do? I couldn’t bring myself to say that I saw Splendor in the Grass eleven times because I was in love with Warren Beatty. I lay awake in bed that night worrying. If I didn’t tell him, then who would I tell? I tried to sleep but I had an erection that only a fifteen-year-old kid can have, and I finally broke down and masturbated, thinking about the lawnmower boy. When I was done I was more miserable than ever, ashamed and degraded. So I got out of bed and put on my bathrobe and went to the nurses’ station, where I asked for a piece of paper and an envelope. I sat at the desk in my room and as Lana Turner tears of self-pity rolled down my cheeks, I wrote, “I THINK I AM A HOMOSEXUAL” in capital letters, signed it, sealed it in the envelope, addressed it to Dr. Myers, and walked leadenly down the hall with it in my hand. I forced myself to put it in the mail slot at the nurses’ station before I could change my mind.